While American architectural styles were inspired by European precedents in the 19th century, new ideas in residential architecture that dismissed most of classicism and the past emerged in the Midwest around 1900. Pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Prairie Style with its strong horizontal lines influenced by the flat Midwestern landscape is a distinctly American approach to architectural design that is more integrated to the site. Wright was a highly original architect who pioneered the style with residences around Chicago as well as Indiana, where there was far more open and undeveloped land to provide a setting for Prairie Style houses than in older European cities.

Prairie Style houses are typically low two-story masonry buildings with projecting single-storey wings and a restrained use of decoration. To achieve a design expression that is horizontal and connected to the land, these houses have gently sloping hip roofs with broad eaves that seem to reiterate the lines of the tree-less Midwestern landscape. This is further reinforced with horizontal ribbon windows with leaded glass in geometric patterns. As counterpoints, narrow vertical windows are used in key locations and broad chimneys rise from the hip roof to anchor and give stability to the design.

Wright and his followers also reinterpreted domestic life to make a stronger connection between indoor and outdoor spaces, and made buildings that appear to emerge naturally from the site. Balconies are common in prairie style houses as well as decks and terraces that extend from the rear and private side of the house. 

Wright had a long career into the 1950s and his design for prairie style houses evolved later into what he termed ‘Usonian’ houses. These small one-story houses were composed in an L-shaped plan around an outdoor terrace connected to the living room. They were designed to bring functionality and beauty to middle-class Americans. 

The origin of art deco is in France and Belgium before the first world war, mostly for decorative objects and furniture. It is characterized by clean simple shapes with ornamentation that is geometric or stylised from representational forms. Art deco houses are rare which makes the Blickman-Jones house in Indianapolis designed by Edward D. Pierre in 1938, an important survivor of this style. It reflects the latter stages of art deco, sometimes called art moderne, with its streamlined look influenced by aerodynamic principles. It has the character-defining features of the style including a flat roof, long horizontal lines, rounded corners and smooth white masonry surfaces. There is decoration in the Jones house, particularly at the entry, but overall it is sparse, perhaps reflecting the sombre times of the 1930s, but also expressing a trend toward the simpler forms and surfaces of modernism.

The modern style is characterized by a rational approach to design, free of any historical associations, with an intent to design something that was highly functional and new. Followers of the modern style embraced new technologies of construction, particularly the use of glass, steel and reinforced concrete. A key principle was the removal of all ornament and decoration. By the 1920s, modernism had become an important movement in Europe. Many of these ideas in nascent form were put forward by American architects in their Midwest prairie style houses.

As the style matured after the second world war, modern houses became simple one to two-story boxes with varying amounts of glass walls to open up the house to connect the inside to the outside. The Miller House in Columbus, designed by Eero Saarinen, has strategically located glass walls to open to views of the modern landscape designed by Dan Kiley. Skylights paralleling the steel structural grid overhead bring linear patterns of natural light to the interior of the house as well as the spaces under the broad overhangs. 

The Warner house, designed by Richard Neutra, is a simple composition of horizontal and vertical planes. The roof extends well beyond the walls to protect the house, while the walls alternate between floor to ceiling glass and solid areas.

The interiors of modern houses show a rethinking of the conventional separate rooms in a house with living spaces more open and flowing together, extending to outdoor terraces. Light is brought into the interiors of these open plans with generous glass areas extending from floor to ceiling. In the Miller House in Columbus, the living, dining and entry is one large space with a sunken sitting area, circular fireplace suspended from above and a floating screen wall to subtly define the entry. The Millers worked with Alexander Girard on the interiors who brought his experience in exhibition, furniture and interior design to enrich the house with colour and furnishings.

After several decades of modern architecture in America, there was disaffection and a taste for change emerging in the 1960s. The critics were seeking an architecture that was more imaginative with expressive forms. Modernist architect and historian Robert Venturi in his influential book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, argued against a minimalist approach in architecture, favouring designs that were more varied and sensitive to the context. Rather than pure and clean modernism, Venturi favoured complexity in the design and hybrids of approach, to make a richer and more meaningful architecture.

The Leibman house in Indianapolis, designed by local architect Evans Woollen, is a composition of two round buildings set in a pastoral landscape. These solid white stucco buildings are a significant departure from the glass box, seeming to echo indigenous or vernacular architecture. Rather than the flat roofs of modernism, conical shapes almost appear to be covered in thatch to express an affinity to a more rural landscape and agrarian spirit.

 Architect Howard Wolner designed his own house on a wooded site in Indianapolis as an essay on building with nature, carefully preserving existing trees. The entry is through a heavy panelled wooden door with views into a courtyard with a sculptural piece echoing primitive art set in the landscape. The L-shaped building frames an outdoor living space that is further enhanced with sculpture set in planting. Brick and wooden shingles give a natural and rustic feel to this house embedded in nature.

One of the principal proponents of this new approach was Michael Graves, whose initial houses in Fort Wayne, particularly the Hanselmann house, were key examples of late modern and among the most widely known and published. The design of the Hanselmann house draws inspiration from Le Corbusier, the early Modernist architect whose minimalist white houses were rectangular volumes lifted off the ground with slender columns; flat roofs were usable terraces. Graves begins with this approach and then breaks the pure rectangular volumes in favour of planes which recede and come forward as well as spaces that overlap and are ambiguous at times. The purity of the box is broken as the floor and ceiling are shifted to allow views to upper and lower levels. A tromp l’oeil mural on one wall is an abstracted landscape, an illusion of a landscape beyond. All of these theatrics are also characteristic of the late modern style.

This wide range of architectural design expression in this period make these houses difficult to put into one style or category, but clearly there was a break from the principles that had guided the first decades of modern style design. Perhaps what ties them together is the idiosyncratic pursuit of something new with more varied meanings and symbolism beyond the minimalist appeal of modernism. Both Stanley Tigerman and Michael Graves went on from this period to design buildings with more of an outright historicist approach, borrowing from earlier styles, that later came to be known as postmodern architecture.